There is no better way
to arrive at a film festival. Twisting and turning on the Olympic piste, the
snow a wake of flying foam, the sun-gleaming Wasatch mountains rinsing the
eyes and soul, I finally pull up with a staccato swish on the plain of level
whiteness at the edge of Park City, Utah. Before me and all around me, what a
panorama. Even the poet Horace, who sang the wonders
of tall-standing Mount Soracte "nivecandidum"
(white with snow), would struggle to find words for the spectacle of this old
silver-mining town coated voluptuously each winter with snow and ice and
jewel-like frosts.

In the early 1980s the
actor turned cine-guru Robert Redford, in a weird decision
that has been validated by time, decided to hold America's premier film
festival in the same month that Park City hosts every damn skier
(swish-swoosh!) in the nation: or at least those who can't get to Sun Valley,
Idaho. Every January the town has a population explosion of megaton
proportions. Gridlock reigns. Traffic seethes. Tow-away zones multiply. (As
the old outlaws who once took refuge in this hamlet used to say, "You
can run, but you can't park.") And on every bus or shuttle van, camera
tripods fight it out for space with skis and snowboards.

Yet somehow, everyone
goes about his or her business and seems to enjoy it.

This year's Sundance
Film Festival was the 25th. Redford told us he felt his
baby had now grown up, leaving him free at last to return to more fulltime work
as an actor, director and producer. Yet Sundance without Redford, without
his snowblinding grin  a deus-ex-anorak
loosening his ski jacket each year at the opening press conference  is
barely imaginable. In a few short hours of that opening day he gives enough
photo-ops to fill a gallery, endowing the coming event with its numinous
glow. Smiling with Jennifer Aniston, hugging director
Nicole Holofcener (whose all-star chick flick
FRIENDS WITH MONEY was the gala opening) or carefully upstaging any
whippersnapper male actor trying to move in on his crown as Hollywood Adonis,
he sets the mythic components in place.

Then we watch the
movies.

The best thing about
Sundance every year is that these are unguessable.
Before the festival the tipsters insist we watch out for SUCH AND SUCH and SO
AND SO. (A vaunted masterwork from an indie
veteran,
say, or a debut delight from a young Turk). Instead we find the early
standouts are UNHEARD-OF FROM NOWHERE and WHERE ON EARTH DID THIS COME FROM.
Remember RESERVOIR DOGS? A true overnight Sundance success. Its then unknown
owner, one Q. Tarantino, was soon helpless to
control the leash of fame which dragged him across the world to Cannes,
Katmandu and beyond. (See yah...)

Always at Sundance,
the best films emerge from a chrysalis of unpredictability. This year too the
betting odds changed daily. But my four favourites,
by the close, were THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED, THE PROPOSITION, THE NIGHT
LISTENER and ALPHA DOG.

▓

THIS FILM IS NOT YET
RATED is a corking documentary from Kirby
Dick.
As investigative journalism goes, it goes like a rocket, even if its area of
exploration is hardly outer space. Dick is out to get the MPAA (Motion
Picture Association of America). America's prime movie-rating organisation, he reveals, is operated in secrecy by an
anonymous cabal in a building as visitor-friendly as Fort Knox. Its
inconsistent, often exasperating (to filmmakers) classification decisions 
particularly in the embattled zone between R and NC 17, where millions of
dollars can be lost in forfeiting a studio's willingness to publicise adults-only releases  are taken with no
accountability to anyone, except possibly its longtime boss and former Lyndon
Johnson aide Jack Valenti (just recently
retired).

So Dick hires a
private eye to unearth names, ranks and telephone numbers; to go through one
rating judge's trash (where he discovers bloodcurdling details of the more
lenient way the studios are treated compared to the helpless independents);
and to expose the star-chamber creepiness of the MPAA's
appeals board, where unnamed final arbiters, including one Catholic and one
Episcopalian priest, hear the protests of filmmakers who feel unfairly
graded. It is all riveting, especially when Dick provides his final zinger.
He submits his own film to the ratings board  this film  and receives,
guess what, a Draconian NC 17. For being disrespectful to the MPAA? No. For
including too many explicit sex shots in order to argue and substantiate his
thesis. There's something wrong about the tone of the MPAA.

▓

THE PROPOSITION is an
1850s-set Australian western scripted by a rock musician (Nick Cave), shot in
colours that oscillate between dream and nightmare,
and starring the oddest mixture of north/south-hemisphere actors since LA
CONFIDENTIAL. That movie's Guy Pearce plays the captured Irish-Australian
brigand who receives the proposition of the title from outback police chief
Ray Winston. He (Pearce) must find his murderously
rampaging older brother (Danny Huston) and bring him back
alive, if he wants to save the life of his younger brother, sitting in the
desert town's death row.

Add John Hurt as an
opulently gabby bounty hunter and Emily Watson
as
Winstone's refined wife  laying the table for
Christmas dinner even as violence swirls towards her household  and the
movie would be a feast for acting cameo collectors if it were nothing more.
But it is. Cave's script has a terse and mischievous eloquence. Cameraman Benoξt Delhomme's images are awesome,
from sunset-crimsoned deserts to dead-tree wildernesses blanched with ruin.
And director John Hillcoat, who made poetic
misanthropy go a long way in GHOSTS OF THE CIVIL DEAD, makes it go even
further here, bringing the ghost of Peckinpah to
the other side of the world.

▓

Robin Williams plays
gay in Patrick Stettner's THE NIGHT LISTENER, but
this sure isn't THE BIRDCAGE. Adapted from Armistead Maupin's novel based on
an incident in his own life, Stettner's tenebrous
thriller-drama sends radio jock Williams into the labryinth of a mysterious child-abuse case. Contacted by
a teenage boy recovering from years of sex victimisation
and by the social worker (Toni Collette) now
looking after him, Williams risks his own life 
and sacrifices his love life with a steady partner  to pursue his obsessive sleuthwork.

Who are these people?
Do they actually exist? Is it safe to meet them? Enigma moves towards grand guignol. Reason
moves towards unreason. And trust becomes another word for credulity as Stettner and his writers (including Maupin and Terry
Anderson, the actual ex-boyfriend here fictionalised)
ask, "What is truth? What is love? And how many people does it take to
form a loving relationship  two, three, a dozen or one?" Williams has
never played a straight role better. Stettner, as
in THE BUSINESS OF STRANGERS, makes enclosed spaces and entangled friendships
seem the perfect recipe for thought-provoking spookiness.

▓

But ALPHA DOG will
surely be remembered as the Sundance movie that delivered a kidney wallop to
audience expectation. Nick Cassavetes made the good
UNHOOK THE STARS, the not-so-good SHE'S SO LOVELY and the downright lunatic
THE NOTEBOOK. As son of John he owed us a masterwork. Here it is, though
owing less to CassavetesSrthan to older and
younger film masters. This fictive re-imagining of a true crime  the
kidnapping and murder of a gang-related boy which incriminated half a dozen
teenage hoodlums along with ringleader Johnny Truelove (Emile Hirsch)  has the pulse-quickening panache of a Scorsese film
allied to the chromatic expressionism of Nicholas Ray.

It almost is a 1950s movie, transported
to 2006. Youths party in opulent ranch-style mansions while powerless parents
look on or look away. Enmities intensify as colours
catch fire, screens climactically split, and a supporting cast of all-sorts
stars seize their moments. (Sharon Stone, her face bagged up with prostheses,
her eyes raw with grief, has a stunning scene near the end). Yet the film is
never out of control. A sound structure, a sprinkling of snapped one-liners
("Do me a favour, Susan, have a period or
something!") and a knowledge of when to go for the big moment visually
create rhythm, strength and architecture. What Cassavetes
does with the valley of windmills near Palm Springs  raised in culminating
scenes to an otherworldly poetry almost science-fictional  should become as
canonic as what Ray did with the Griffith Observatory in REBEL WITHOUT A
CAUSE.

ALPHA DOG proves what
we knew about Sundance and have known throughout its 25 years. Whenever it seems
too late to be astonished  in any given January in Park City when we have
started to feel snowbound rather than spellbound  it isn't. 2006 takes its
place among the best years. Give me my jacket, bring me my gloves and book me
my snowboard for 2007.

COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS.

WITH THANKS TO THE
AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA.